When architectural historian Reyner Banham wrote Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), quite possibly the most influential book published about the Southern Californian metropolis, he saw fit to dismiss the center of the city with what he called “a note on downtown.” He concedes that it has its landmarks, like the Cathedral of Santa Vibiana and the much-filmed Bradbury Building, “one of the most magnificent relics of nineteenth-century commercial architecture anywhere in the world.” But he finds the urban scene that surrounds them hopelessly depleted: “Many US cities have had their downtown areas fall into this kind of desuetude,” but “in none of the others does one have quite such a strong feeling that this is where the action cannot possibly be.”
Things have changed since The Architecture of Four Ecologies came out more than half a century ago. After countless aborted attempts at revival, downtown Los Angeles seems finally to have found its way to becoming a true city center once again.
This has to do with a number of factors, including its positioning as the hub of the rail transit that’s been opening in stages since the early nineties, its levels of commercial and residential density at which today’s zoning laws make difficult or impossible to build, and the sheer diversity of its built environment. In the Architectural Digest video above, Los Angeles architect Valéry Augustin provides a walking tour of that diversity, introducing a striking building from each era of the city’s development.
Banham and Agustin agree on the importance of Los Angeles’ City Hall and Union Station. But Augustin also highlights the Art Deco Eastern Columbia Building, the Churrigueresque Million Dollar Theater, and a couple of major structures that Banham didn’t live to see, the Broad Museum and Ramon C. Cortines School Of Visual And Performing Arts. (Notably absent is Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, whose once-shocking metallic curves have perhaps been overexposed over these past couple of decades.) But whatever the wonders of downtown, it’s long been argued that Los Angeles’ has more of a private architectural heritage than a public one; to understand the city’s architecture, in other words, you can’t ignore its houses.
Hence Architectural Digest’s having also put out a video in which Augustin breaks down the five most common types of Los Angeles home. These include example of the romanticized Mission Revival style, the idyllic California bungalow, the boardwalk beach house (as seen in ocean enclaves like Santa Monica and Venice), and more culturally representative housing forms such as bungalow courts (as seen in Party of Five) and postwar dingbat apartments. With their broad carports, their playfully exotic names, and their boxlike construction fronted, as Banham observes, by a range of styles from “from Tacoburger Aztec to Wavy-Line Moderne, from Cod Cape Cod to un-supported Jaoul vaults, from Gourmet Mansardic to Polynesian Gabled and even — in extremity — Modern Architecture,” they may well be the most Los Angeles buildings of all.
Related content:
The Story of Googie Architecture, the Iconic Architectural Style of Los Angeles
That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles – A Free Online Documentary
1,300 Photos of Famous Modern American Homes Now Online, Courtesy of USC
Take a Drive Through 1940s, 50s & 60s Los Angeles with Vintage Through-the-Car-Window Films
Watch Randy Newman’s Tour of Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard, and You’ll Love L.A. Too
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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